My Spam analysis for December 15 - 21, 2008
If you are reading this you have a computer. If you have a computer you also probably have at least one email address. Unless you live on another planet, or your email provider only allows whitelisted email through, you, like me, get a lot of junk mail, a.k.a. "spam" messages.While spam is an annoyance to most people, it is combat for me. I publish custom spam filters to block spam email for people who use the MailWasher Pro anti-spam email client.
This is the latest entry in a weekly series about classifications of spam, according to my custom filter rules used by the anti-spam tool, MailWasher Pro.
MailWasher Pro is a spam screening POP3 email program that goes between your email servers and your desktop email client (application). With this program you can actually read all of your incoming email in plain text, and click on links, if you are so inclined. MailWasher Pro uses a variety of techniques to recognize and designate what is and isn't spam, including a learning filter and user created custom filter rules. I personally write and use MailWasher Pro custom filters to detect and delete most incoming spam email. I have created and published a large assortment of spam filters which "plug-in" to MailWasher Pro, to flag or delete known spam. You can read about them, or download and use them in your own registered copy of MailWasher Pro.
MailWasher Pro has a "Statistics" display page that breaks down the types of spam it has deleted, listed by categories. Each program and user-created filter has a name and when a measurable percentage of spam is matched by a particular filter it shows up in the Statistics, with its percentage shown next to it. The percentages for various categories of spam listed below are taken from my MailWasher Pro "Statistics" page.
The category "Other Filters" combines several of my custom filters which did not receive enough spam to rate a measurable percentage, thus were all grouped into the one category called "Other Filters." Since I have a lot of custom filters and spam types do vary every week, the Other Filters category is always quite large, percentage-wise.
The overall volume of spam hitting my filters has dropped to very low levels not seen in years. This is due to the problems that Russian cyber criminals are having finding hosts for the servers used to issue command and control signals to their Botnets. This is a fluid situation, with spammers finding temporary hosts who come under pressure from security companies then terminate their connectivity. This has been going on since November 11, 2008. Currently, most spam is being sent via the resurrected Mega-D Botnet, which is famous for male enhancement spam.
The most prominent types of spam categorized this week were for imitations of brand name watches, followed by pirated software, then for fake Viagra from the fake Canadian Pharmacy. Many of these types of spam were caught by my Sender's Blacklist rules, like lin+met@+.de, thus, the Blacklist category is tied for the top position.
MailWasher Pro spam category breakdown for December 15 - 21, 2008. Spam amounted to 18% of my incoming email this week, with just 49 spam messages analyzed.
Blacklisted Domains/Senders: (by pattern matching wildcard rules like: lin+met@+.de) | 14.29% |
---|---|
Counterfeit Watches: | 14.29% |
Hidden ISO Subject: | 10.20% |
Viagra spam: | 10.20% |
Fake "Canadian Pharmacy" spam (fake Viagra, Cialis, etc): | 10.20% |
Known Spam Domains: (mostly pharmaceutical spam) | 8.16% |
Other filters: (See my MWP Filters page) | 8.16% |
Subject All Capitals or No Subject: (Nigerian 419 and Lottery scams) | 8.16% |
Numeric IP to Trojan download: | 4.08% |
Blocked Countries, RIPE, LACNIC, APNIC: | 4.08% |
Money Transfer Scams: | 4.08% |
HTML Tricks: | 2.04% |
DNS Blacklists: | 2.04% |
If you are reading this and wondering what you can do to reduce the huge volumes of spam emails that must be overwhelming your POP client inboxes, I recommend MailWasher Pro (with my downloadable custom filters) as an incoming email screener for your POP email program (Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Microsoft Live Mail, Eudora, Mozilla and other stand-alone email programs).
All of the spam and scams targeting my accounts were either automatically deleted by my custom MailWasher Pro spam filters, or if they made it through, was reported to SpamCop, of which I am a reporting member, and manually deleted. I never buy anything that is Spamvertised and recommend you don't either! Remember, almost all spam is now sent from compromised home or business PCs, zombies in various Botnets, all of which are controlled by criminals. If you purchase anything advertised in spam messages, you have given your credit or debit card information to the criminals behind that enterprise. If you are really lucky you will only be charged for the fake items you purchased, but, if not, you might find your credit limit used up, or your bank account emptied (for debit card transactions), by cyber criminals.
Also, unsubscribing through links in botnet-sent spam messages is futile, as you never opted-in, in the first place; your email address was captured by an email harvester on an infected computer belonging to somebody you corresponded with. Instead of receiving less spam as one might expect (by unsubscribing), all it does is confirm that your email address is active and you will see even more spam than before.
Another common way your email address may get harvested by spammers is if it appears in a large C.C. (Carbon Copy) list on a computer that gets Botnetted. Many people engage in forwarding messages among all their friends. Each time they forward chain letters their address gets added to the growing list of recipients (called Carbon Copy, or CC). If just one recipient of that message has an email harvesting malware infection, all of the email addresses listed in that message will be sent home to the spammer behind that spam run.
Smart folks who want to forward or send a message to multiple recipients use B.C.C. instead of C.C. Using B.C.C. hides all of the recipients from displaying. The To field will just show "Undisclosed Recipients" in a message sent using B.C.C. This is safest for you and your friends or mailing list. All email clients have a means of displaying a B.C.C. field.
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